Six Ways to Be a Better Programmer
One of the memes currently floating around the Internet is to describe six things you will do to be a better programmer. Here are my six:
Read one development book per month: I checked my Amazon wish-list, and saw that I had 162 books in there. That’s a whole lot of knowledge out there, just waiting to get into my brain. I put in an order for a dozen of them the other day
Read one business book per month: Besides technical books, I ordered several business books. Managers aren’t interested at throwing endless piles of money at their IT departments. They want to see how their investment in technology will provide value to their customers. If we can meet the customers’ needs, they’ll be glad to pay our companies. So, we developers need to constantly be aware of how we can meet customer needs (one of the tenets of agile development).
Learn a new programming language: I’ve spent most of the last several years working with the .Net framework, developing in either C# or VB.Net. In order to get a new perspective, I’ll learn a completely different type of language. I’m thinking that either Ruby on Rails or Erlang will be the one. Those are both functional languages that are rather hot right now. I don’t know if they’ll lead to any practical application, but stretching my mind will make me a better programmer, even if I keep on writing C# code. If you know of an interesting language for me to look at, please leave a comment.
Contribute to an open-source project: I have an idea for a project that could lead to easier test-writing. That project will be open-sourced. As I get further along in it, I’ll post more about it here.
Release my own commercial product: It’s easy to focus on just writing code, but there is much more to providing computer-based solutions than just typing syntax. By releasing my own commercial product, I’ll be spending time dealing with deployments, customer feedback, support, etc. Even if I only get one customer, the experience will make me a more well-rounded developer.
Write a tutorial: The best way to learn is to teach. This will help me take all those random thoughts and techniques that I use and put them into a structured format. It will also expose any gaps in my knowledge.
Check back to see how things go.